Enhancing readability of web documents by text augmentation for deaf people

Deaf people have particular difficulty in understanding text-based web documents because their mother language, or sign language, is essentially visually oriented. To enhance the readability of text-based web documents for deaf people, we propose a news display system that converts complex sentences in news articles into simple sentences and presents the relations among them with a graphical representation. In particular, we focus on the tasks of 1) identifying subordinate and embedded clauses in complex sentences, 2) relocating them for better readability and 3) displaying the relations among the clauses with the graphical representation. The results of our evaluation show that the proposed system does simplify complex sentences in news articles effectively while maintaining their intended meaning, suggesting that our system can be used in practice to help deaf people to access textual information.